Poll: Should stories be praised for being progressive?

[Wrex Brogan]

*shrug* sure, why not. It's nicer to see some variance instead of the usual 'Straight White Mid-30s Man With Brown Hair and Standard Heroic Build +grizzled 5 o'clock shadow'.

Plus, as someone who isn't straight, I'll be honest... unless the story is related to the sexuality, it really doesn't matter. Maybe in relation to character interactions (if you wish to be boring and have your antagonistic character be 'sexist/racist/transphobic' for... reasons), but if say, the story is about fighting dragons or dealing with magic or anything not-related-to-reality-at-all, then... fuck it. Character could be a black transgender bisexual in a wheelchair for all I care. They're fighting Space Dragons from the Edge of Reality, who's really going to get hung up on them saving the day and kissing the hunky male love interest as the sun sets?

Like, I've never understood the term 'token', or at least how often it's applied to people. 'Cause really, these people... you know, exist in the world. 'Two gay guys, a Muslim Lesbian, an agender Chinese asexual and an Aboriginal dude in a wheelchair' isn't tokenism, that's my usual Saturday night. Nothing token or special about us, we just... are. And it's nice to see ourselves in the media we consume.

Now, doesn't mean I'm going to assume that it's going to be 'good' (some gay representation has been really... bad in things. Whooo boy), but I'm still going to go 'hey, that's pretty neat' if I do hear about a thing that's got something a little... you know, closer to home for me in regards to it's representation.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Or, if 'Hipster Nerd Guy #2' is black, make sure it gets hammered in mentally, but don't re-write any of his lines.

That's assuming that being black would not really affect this character in any way.

Now, sure, in, say, Star Trek, where it's the future and race has been forgotten, that'd work. In a story set nowdays, that's not the case.

 

[MythicMatt]

Pretty sure you mean 'a story set in the 20s'.

Honestly, I thought people had got past the point where we can argue all day about skin colors and life choices, but apparently I'm from an alternate humanity which doesn't understand the culture of this humanity.

 

[Silence]

I actually don't think this is the right question. Progressive stuff always is special, so it ... always gets either praise or damnation.

Meaning that if it is done well, sure, it should get praise, why not? Other good parts of stories also get praise.

This leads to the odd thing when someone just passingly makes their character something 'unusual', without it being the focus of the story. Should this get praised? I would say yes, just because it's something people don't do too often, still.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

That's assuming that being black would not really affect this character in any way.

Now, sure, in, say, Star Trek, where it's the future and race has been forgotten, that'd work. In a story set nowdays, that's not the case.

I don't know ... Star Trek to me has always felt like a show about race to me. Apparently Vulcans have been mingling with other races for centuries, yet they remain insular, isolated, and being honest, utterly undiplomatic, given their incapacity to ameliorate their behaviour in the light of a grander cosmic necessity of community and social cohesion in a galaxy of threats. Same can be said of all the major species.

The line gets further blurred by the idea of a humanoid progenitor (hinted at being the reason why you can have half vulcans, etc) ... which ultimately makes the argument of divergent species more pointless a means of delineation, and all about a question specifically of the races of some kind of proto-collective humanity.

If anything, the only real example of cultural diaspora beyond race and species has been the Borg, and they're painted specifically as evil because they try to annihilate division and destroy the arbitrary nature of degrees of seperation within galactic society. Or you can always take the enlightened position that Star Trek is fun, and who doesn't like big ships full of explorers, barging into foreign societies like a bull in a china shop?

I think the anthropologist and zoologist Wrangham puts it best when he talks about the 'Paradise Lost' problem of Arcadia. In the search of the exotic merely transposing our selective ideas of division, culture and violence, transforming them based solely on an idea of; "this society would be perfect if its problems weren't so much like our own."

That an explorer has only sufficiently explored enough to see the illusion that behind the exotic facade lay another culture that is just as reliant on resources and the inherent violence of power dynamics that guarantee a degree of hostile reality. Which I think Star Trek does really well, and also communicates that message pretty well. "We're all quite alike, in the end. And that's the problem."

 

[StatusNil]

The Wire was a show full of nasty, scary, brutish black people. Omigosh, what a terrible racist stereotype! Burn it down! And yet nobody complained because they were in show up to it's ears in black people of all kinds.

It was? And here I was thinking it was full of deep and understanding portrayals of people caught on the fringes of a dysfunctional society, respectful enough not to airbrush them into ciphers without relatable humanity. It relied on that relatability for appeal, rather than being aggressively preachy with cartoons to stand in for the fucked up state of things. Some of the bureaucrats portrayed might have been disconnected and compromised by their venal concerns, but they weren't twirling their 'staches and cackling about "Time to Op-press me some People of Color again!" And on the other side, you were seeing similarly exploitative structures built into the networks of the marginalized criminals, rather than saintly victimhood.

Come to think of it, it was a very good show. In fact, one of the best ever. Not because it was sharply critical of social conditions, but because it built a compelling drama with credible characters out of the situation it depicted. You could have made an awful show in exactly the same setting, just by propagandizing with characters cut out of protest placards.

That's why it's a big "NO" on the vote on top.

Edit: As for various kinds of minority characters being perceived as "requiring an extra explanation for being there", I'd say that's because there is such a pervasive pre-existing context for such "inclusiveness" that makes them stick out. Which of course is the massive "diversity" promotion campaign. So many can't help seeing them in the disruptive light of a deliberate insertion of a promoted good. In other words, very much like PRODUCT PLACEMENT, in which the product being promoted is the "inclusivity" of the fictive world itself. And this is jarring for many people who don't want to be broken out of a narrative into such meta concerns. They want "some other reason" for that character because they want to be immersed in the fiction.

Now of course there is nothing inherently fiction-breaking about a minority character. It's just an inescapable reaction because of the very prevalence of the inclusivity campaign has, as the saying goes, poisoned the well of diversity with the bitter taste of reNeducation. If we're going to get past this, producers of entertainment need to stop using "diversity" as a selling point. If it's not a selling point, it will not strike people as one. Just create what you create, but refuse to treat it as a bullet point in promotional materials. No statements about wanting to "reflect the true diversity" of Whatever Culture. Reflect all you want, but don't get drawn into the circle of smug self-congratulation on "muh progressiviness" that various media leeches subsist on. It is that which marks every "minority" character" as a cipher of an agenda, and that's an awful thing to do.

 

[False Messiah]

For me it depends on what the writer was trying to accomplish. Every character ever written was written with a purpose, the goal being to add to the story. Lets look at four of them:

"I need a new character that is forgettable just so my protagonist can bum a smoke from someone so I'll write the most basic of basic white dudes I can imagine."
"I need a new character, I was looking out my window and saw my gay black neighbor mowing the law. The character will be based on them, I don't know if their race/sexuality will be addressed in the story, but my neighbor is my inspiration at the moment"
"I'm writing a story about a asexual person in a sexual world, obviously they need to be asexual"
"I need a new character, the last one was white so this one will be Asian so people will think I'm progressive"

The first one is default, the writer just pulls from their surrounding, if they are white and straight, it will probably be a white and straight person.

The second one is better and usually makes a better character though this is more work and usually not used for throwaway characters.

The third one can be good, but only if the writer can pull from personal experience or has done some significant research. These characters exist as minorities to drive a plot about minorities, and you could call these stories "progressive".

The last one is a "Token Character" and is usually born from lazy writing and bad character construction.

(edit, typos)

 

[Ryallen]

Umm... if you want to?

So, here's the thing. Why do you think it is that only minority characters are required to justify their existence?

Why isn't the question, "Why is this character a Straight White Male? How does this add to his character? Does this character sufficiently explore what it means to be a Straight White Male? If not, why does he need to exist? Was this character just included to pander to the Straight White Male lobby?"

Anyone who does ask those questions is doing it to make a point, like I am right here, and usually gets shouted down for being a feminazi SJW etc etc.

Other kinds of people exist. Surely they're as valid a character type as ye olde Straight White Male (possibly with brown hair).

Well, the reason why I posed this question in the first place is that, like I said, people drew attention to the fact that there were characters that were black and transgendered in the respective shows and then praised them for it. The reason why I'm skeptical is that those traits of the two characters were put in with no real effort, as in it seemed like they flipped a coin and decided "Fuck it." Again, I'm not saying that they need to justify their existence, but how they were implemented seems more like the writers of the show have demonstrated that they look out a window to see the different kinds of people rather than just the generic straight white dude. At best, they are being praised for having a coin flip tails instead of heads.

 

[Lightspeaker]

This, in of itself, seemed silly, as while transgender isn't something that's so unusual to provoke a reaction of typical anime magnitude, it IS certainly something that can be considered uncommon at best. And, after doing some research into her personality and found it to be completely unrelated to her characterization, I felt that giving this character a transgendered sexuality did nothing to add to the character as a whole other than just a simple "jacket" in terms of importance and impact on their inclusion.

Anybody can have gender dysphoria; it's not limited to people of a certain personality type. It's no less likely that Rui has it.

You may not think it "added" anything, but that's how the writer has envisaged the character. There's not really any reason that a trans character has to justify their inclusion any more than anyone else; there's no reason a gay character has to have a reason to be gay any more than a straight character has to have a reason to be straight. In the real world, not everyone is straight, and there is no plot-related reason for it; likewise, there's no reason to just default to straight for everyone in a fictional setting.

What I'm trying to say is, things like this seem token. Not everything has to be some kind of statement about who they are and how their race or sexuality affects everything. But, at the same time, I feel that sexuality does play at least a small part in how someone interacts with the world around them, and not acknowledging it does nothing to add to the rhetoric that most people have come to accept. As for the race thing, ehh... Mostly that just brought the question to my attention and kinda rounds up to the full version of the above inquiry:

Sexuality informs who we are, but that doesn't need to be central to their story. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. See above; the vast majority of characters are straight by default, and the question never comes up as to whether there should have been a reason to pick heterosexuality. Treat gay characters the same way!

The only real exception being when an element of the story requires the character to have a certain sexuality.

I like this post a lot.

If the 'progressiveness' shown is a character who has no characterization beyond "I'm a [whatever minority]", no.

If the character is an actual character instead of there for the sake of being there, yes.

If everything they say relates to them piling on how 'progressive' they are, that's more of a step in the opposite direction. Sort of like asking if you're cool.

And this.



The problem as I see it is that an awful lot of characters in various forms of media SEEM to be written as flat personalities. There are rather poor attempts to actually flesh them out. I actually was rather pleased when Rowling came out with the whole "Dumbledore is gay" thing. Why? Because going back you could see some of it in the writing, but there was never any need to explicitly come out with it in the text. And that's realisitic. I met some new people a few months ago, it was only two weeks ago that I found out that one of them is gay. Why? Because it never came up before then, it never needed to. That's how it happens in real life. The difficulty becomes how you show something that isn't immediately apparent.

"Progressiveness" isn't bad. The problem is when that is the only goal of a piece of media. I actually find anime as a whole to be very refreshing for this kind of thing; because it often seems to be more diverse than most western media. Whereas the west is very careful and particular about making things that try not to offend anyone it always seems like anime series don't care about offending anyone. Which means people are more free to create a broader range of character types (even if some seem to come up again and again).

 

[CyanCat47_v1legacy]

i think so but that is just a personal preferance. most people have elements and messages they like in stories that elevates stories containing these in their eyes. for example i saw some reviews of life of pi that criticized the movie for being about faith. likewise most reviews of the martian on the internet contained the caviat that the fact that the movie heralded science as the number one problem solver. personally i love both moveis because of these factors. as another example i have heard a lot of good things about rick and morty but it from what i understand the guiding philosophy is also heavily based on niechtzian philosophy which i cannot stand

 

[hermes]

Yes, but only if it is done well.

If done poorly, or only to fill up a checklist, the story is not worthy of praise.

 

[JoJo]

For me it depends on what the writer was trying to accomplish. Every character ever written was written with a purpose, the goal being to add to the story. Lets look at four of them:

"I need a new character that is forgettable just so my protagonist can bum a smoke from someone so I'll write the most basic of basic white dudes I can imagine."
"I need a new character, I was looking out my window and saw my gay black neighbor mowing the law. The character will be based on them, I don't know if their race/sexuality will be addressed in the story, but my neighbor is my inspiration at the moment"
"I'm writing a story about a asexual person in a sexual world, obviously they need to be asexual"
"I need a new character, the last one was white so this one will be Asian so people will think I'm progressive"

The first one is default, the writer just pulls from their surrounding, if they are white and straight, it will probably be a white and straight person.

The second one is better and usually makes a better character though this is more work and usually not used for throwaway characters.

The third one can be good, but only if the writer can pull from personal experience or has done some significant research. These characters exist as minorities to drive a plot about minorities, and you could call these stories "progressive".

The last one is a "Token Character" and is usually born from lazy writing and bad character construction.

(edit, typos)

The problem I can see with this is that there's no way for the reader to tell from the text what the author's intention was. Let's say I write a book and the protagonist's neighbour Joe Bloggs is black. How can the reader tell if Joe is based on my own black neighbour in real life, or if I decided to make him black as the rest of the main cast is white? And does it really matter either way?

 

[False Messiah]

The problem I can see with this is that there's no way for the reader to tell from the text what the author's intention was. Let's say I write a book and the protagonist's neighbour Joe Bloggs is black. How can the reader tell if Joe is based on my own black neighbour in real life, or if I decided to make him black as the rest of the main cast is white? And does it really matter either way?

I think it does matter for the simple reason that I can usually tell the difference. But I guess that if someone can't tell the difference then it wouldn't matter either way for that person.

 

[thewatergamer]

No, just because something is "progressive" doesn't automatically make it good, If you want to touch on controversial topics in a story by all means go ahead, but I get REALLY pissed off when a shit story is excused by some people, or worse, people pile on and rage at any type of critique of it just because "Buz ifs pwogessive and dat mns u cant hte it!"

 

[happyninja42]

No, just because something is "progressive" doesn't automatically make it good, If you want to touch on controversial topics in a story by all means go ahead, but I get REALLY pissed off when a shit story is excused by some people, or worse, people pile on and rage at any type of critique of it just because "Buz ifs pwogessive and dat mns u cant hte it!"

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the issue. Progressive by itself is meaningless, if the story isn't good, I don't care.

I've said in other threads, I don't care what the character is, their ethnicity, sexual identity or orientation. If they are poorly written, I will be annoyed. If they are well written, I will enjoy their contribution to the story, whatever it is.

Being "progressive" but also being a shit story basically means you are working on the quality level of an After-School Special, or "A very special episode of Blossom." Tell me a good, compelling fucking story, with whatever characters you want, and I will enjoy it. Tell me a shit story, with token characters shoved in to simply accomplish an agenda, and I will not enjoy it, quite the opposite.

 

[Zhukov]

The reason why I'm skeptical is that those traits of the two characters were put in with no real effort, as in it seemed like they flipped a coin and decided "Fuck it."

Would it have taken more or less effort to make those characters more standard?

...but how they were implemented seems more like the writers of the show have demonstrated that they look out a window to see the different kinds of people rather than just the generic straight white dude.

Is that a bad thing?

Would it have been better if they had not looked out that metaphorical window?

At best, they are being praised for having a coin flip tails instead of heads.

Given how characters tend to default to certain traits, I'd say it's more like they flipped a coin and it landed upright on its side and stayed like that.

 

[MCerberus]

There's always going to be a spectrum of goals towards having an artistic point or being simply entertainment. Having it align with your worldview is not itself worth praising. If a work has something to say, you need to look at whether what it's saying has merit (it argues well) and whether it has executed on it.

I like Adventure Time. It generally posits that everyone is a person with their own tragedies and aspirations. Little more than a constant argument in favor of Kantian ethics(seriously, like every plot line shakes out in favor of the Kantian mantra), but that never gets in the way of character exploration. Progressive? Well if you want to stretch it, it's pretty feminist I guess.

You want progressive though, that's the house that Sugar built.

 

[Mister K]

Progressive story doesn't automatically becomes a good one thanks to progressiveness, so I say no.

Besides, peoples definition of a "progressive story" varies so much that it is impossible to make a unified one.

 

[K12]

Tokenism isn't progressive, in fact if anything it's retrogressive if you draw attention to it clumsily. Kind of like expecting brownie points (badum tish) for having a black friend.

What's genuinely progressive is when you manage to effectively portray the experiences of people who differ from what the audience is used to seeing helping the audience empathise or identify with perspectives they might not expect to or challenging their assumptions. For something to be genuinely progressive it requires good writing (though not the other way round) and so yes it is praiseworthy.

On the flip side, you shouldn't be required to do this to "justify" putting a minority character in your work. Some accusations of tokenism seem to be based on the assumption that everyone should be white, male, straight etc. unless the fact that they aren't "normal" is essential to the character and story. Most of the time it just doesn't matter.